Narrating the digital: border crossings between videogame and literature in Piglia, Gamerroand Fernández Silanes

Abstract

This paper analyses the relationship between literature and video games, questioning how certain literary works thematise the digital and problematise it. We assume as a theoretical perspective the cultural semiotics of Iuri Lotman and his notion of "frontier", understood as a zone of intense exchange and negotiation of meaning. We will exemplify with three novels: Ricardo Piglia's La ciudad ausente (1992) and the story machine as an analogue-digital amphibian; the video game and hacker culture as a political battering ram in Carlos Gamerro's Las Islas (1998); and the way in which Nona Fernández Silanes' novel Space Invaders (2014) metaphorically empowers the video game to express an epochal experience. Our aim is to show the versatility of literary language to translate novel phenomena and experiences in the system of culture. We are interested in highlighting the dialogical relations between the different languages of culture, in this case literature thematising the video game.